Security-by-Design for Nuclear Facilities

Additional Information:

BIOGRAPHY

Syed Rafiul Hussain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University.  Before joining Penn State, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University from where he also received his Ph.D. in December 2018.  His research interests broadly lie in network and systems secruity, including NextG and cyber-physical systems.  He received the NSF CAREER award and the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2022.  He was inducted into the Hall of FAme Mobile Security Research by the GSMA for his contributions to imporving the security of 4G and 5G cellular networks.  More details about him and his research group are available at https://syed-rafiul-hussain.github.io/ and https://synsec-den.github.io/

ABSTRACT

Cyberattacks targeting nuclear facilities have significantly increased in recent years.  For instance, the Stuxnet worm caused significant damage to the centrifuge operations in a nuclear facility by changing the converter frequency from 2Hz to 1410 Hz.  Similar attacks also happened on the industrial control systems controlling water storage tanks in Texas and power grids in Ukraine, leading to sever service disruptions.  In this talk, I will first highlight the threat surfaces and attack landscape of nuclear facilities.  I will then present formal security analysis techniques and runtime verification mechanisms to detect such sophisticated threats and protect these critical infrastructures.